WashWise launches Reset Spray, a $29 “dry shampoo for clothes” aimed at reducing laundry days, water use, and the release of microplastics.
The average American family washes about 300 loads of laundry a year, and a standard machine draws roughly 20 gallons of water for each one (14 gallons on an ENERGY STAR–certified washer). WashWise, a new clothing-care brand is built on the premise that a good share of those loads never needed a wash at all.
The company’s first product, Reset Spray, is a $29, six-ounce mist that WashWise calls “dry shampoo for clothes,” made for garments that are not dirty enough to wash but not fresh enough to wear again. The spray neutralizes odors, lifts away sweat and body oils, and relaxes wrinkles, the company said in its launch materials, using plant-derived ingredients — ethyl lauroyl arginate to neutralize odor-causing bacteria, chitosan to relax fibers, cyclodextrin to trap odor molecules — delivered through bag-on-valve packaging that produces a fine mist without an aerosol propellant. It comes in two scents, Cotton Cooldown and Verde Rise, and WashWise says one bottle can save up to 110 gallons of water, roughly six hours of laundry time, and $300 in dry-cleaning costs over its life by standing in for washes and dry-cleaning trips.
At 20 gallons a standard load, a household clears 6,000 gallons a year at the machine before accounting for hot-water heating or the wash-and-rinse cycles of clothes that were barely worn. Reset Spray’s argument is aimed one step earlier, at the decision to run the load in the first place — the sweater worn once to dinner, the jeans with a single day on them, the blazer that smells like the restaurant rather than like sweat.
Washing does more than use up water. A single load of laundry can release up to 18 million microfibers, the Ocean Conservancy reports, and those synthetic fibers are now among the most common microplastics found in the environment. A 2019 study in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports measured the shedding directly, finding that washing releases between 124 and 308 milligrams of microfibers per kilogram of fabric — the equivalent of roughly 640,000 to 1.5 million fibers for every kilogram in the drum, the researchers found. The totals climb from there. Laundry alone sends about half a million tonnes of plastic microfibers into the ocean each year, and synthetic clothing accounts for an estimated 9 percent of microplastic losses to the sea. Between 1950 and 2016, washing clothes emitted 5.6 million metric tons of synthetic microfibers, half of it in the last decade of that span, per the Ocean Conservancy. Many of the fibers are fine enough to slip through the system meant to catch them, with wastewater treatment plants allowing up to 40 percent of the microfibers they receive to pass into natural waterways, the UNEP notes.
A between-washes spray does not filter any of that out; it works by reducing how often the drum turns at all. Every wash a garment skips is water not drawn, fibers not shed, and heat not spent, which is the case WashWise is making with a bottle rather than a machine.
WashWise is the work of Maria Cabral Menezes, who traded public equities at J.P. Morgan and Citadel before starting the company and now guest-lectures at the Wharton School on decision-making and bias. Her pitch treats laundry as a habit worth interrogating rather than a chore to automate, and the company frames Reset Spray as a way to extend a garment’s wear between washes, not to replace washing outright. The “dry shampoo for clothes” mantra does the same work as dry shampoo itself: it buys a few days, not a permanent reprieve.
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